Working in cross-college roles in further education

Abstract

Since incorporation, the FEFC funding formula and the development of new vocational qualifications, there has been a growth in posts with the function of co-ordinating policies across the whole college. key feature of these type of posts is that they usually have to fulfil that function without direct line management of the staff implementing the procedures or practices. Using the cohort who attended a training event on this topic, the article analyses these cross-college managers' perceptions of the nature of their managerial role in terms of the sources of power they se. The overall analysis suggests that there is a continuum of sources of power stemming from external requirements such that the stronger the external requirements the more coercive the source of a co-ordinator's power. The co-ordinators' main aim was to turn this and the other sources of power (reward, expert and referent) into legitimate power.